


Synthesize ⇄ Metabolize

by supaslim



Series: for a firmament [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Archive!Jon, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Gen, Helen/Jon if you want to see it, Martin/Jon if you want to see it, Monster!Jon, Season/Series 04, Starvation, brief appearances by Peter Lukas and Elias, hungry!Jon, post MAG146
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22582159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supaslim/pseuds/supaslim
Summary: "What do you say, Daisy. You and me head down in the tunnels, hunter and hunted, and just have at. You catch me, you kill me like every other monster you've put down.""You catch me...""I catch you, I rip the fear out of you like Jared ripped the bones out of me, until you're completely empty."Post MAG146- Jon's eating habits are being monitored. It doesn't go well.With every statement he takes in, he loses a little more of his humanity, until there's not much left at all.
Relationships: Helen & Jonathan Sims, Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Series: for a firmament [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025538
Comments: 108
Kudos: 543





	Synthesize ⇄ Metabolize

**Author's Note:**

> so uhhhhh THIS happened just now
> 
> no editing we die like archivist's assistants

He _agreed_ to this. He has to remind himself often, because as time wears on, it gets harder and harder to remember that fact, especially when he'd hardly been able to get a word in at the time.

Still, it feels less like going cold turkey than it does going on a hunger strike. He's not sure how to explain that to the others. He suspects they won't listen if he tries.

His stomach doesn't rumble, but every cell in his body itches as he prowls the stacks, digging worn, stained statements from their file folders entirely by instinct. His fingers twitch over the ink, then he adds it to the pile and continues on. It feels for all the world like digging through the chaff to salvage what little moldy, long-dead wheat remains.

He can, he realizes, smell the real ones on the stale, dusty air. There's blood in these statements, and the tang of adrenaline. Salt. Iron. Fear.

He tries not to think about it.

He doesn't know how long he's been at it when the door to the archive opens. He doesn't look, but he knows it's Basira. Lower case "k", knows- her flavor of lurking is very different from Daisy's, and they're the only ones he sees on any regular basis, now. Besides, Daisy usually invites herself in and insinuates herself nearby, just close enough to feel the company without pressure on either of them to really socialize.

Basira just... lurks. She's a silhouette in the door, making sure Jon's still where he belongs. After several seconds watching him mill about in the gloom, she's gone again.

He blindly opens another filing cabinet, and pulls two statements free without reading them, just _Knowing_ by touch alone that they were true.

Capital "K", Knowing.

* * *

There's a tape recorder sitting on the corner of his desk. He didn't put it there. He definitely didn't press record- he never does, these days. However, there it is, hissing softly as the tape spools.

He glances wearily up at it between statements, shifting the one he'd read to the growing stack on his right, and pulling a new one from the dwindling pile on his left. It's funny, he finds himself thinking. He's pretty sure that the tapes the Magnus Institute buys are the cheap ones, only thirty minutes to a side- plenty to record a statement. He's been reading for ( _three hours and forty eight minutes_ ) a while, and it's been quietly recording the entire time. The recorder never chunked to a stop at the end of the tape, and the Eye certainly never materialized to awkwardly fumble with it and change it out for a fresh blank.

He props his chin on his palm and watches it for a moment. His other hand runs over the fresh statement. He can tell by touch alone that this one is old; the fear is stale and dead and he's not sure it's even worth the energy it takes to consume it, for what little it will offer in return. It feels for all the world like the Archive itself is fighting him for each scrap, each bone, and it generally wins.

He's so damn _tired_.

"Are you recording the statements, or me?" he asks the tape recorder in a mumble. It doesn't respond. It's a tape recorder. It continues recording. He shakes his head in a jerk, trying and failing to shake off the bone-deep exhaustion. "Suppose it doesn't matter." He sighs down at the dead statement on his desk, and pushes it forward to start a new pile before rifling for something fresher.

* * *

He leaves the Archive at one point. To stretch his legs, he tells himself, and maybe he'll pick up a coffee and a salad at the bistro around the corner on his way back. He's starving, he really is, but at the same time... Well, it's not food he has an appetite for these days.

He is acutely aware of Melanie watching him leave. She watches from the doorway of the break room, down the hall, frozen in the middle of whatever she's doing. She doesn't say anything to him, only narrows her eyes and presses her lips together in a tight frown. Jon blinks and glances at his feet before nervously raking his fingers through his hair and hurrying along down the hall.

Melanie doesn't follow, but he feels eyes on him with every step he takes.

Is it Daisy, he wonders, or Basira, dogging his steps? Or maybe, he considers with a grimace as he rounds the corner, it's just the Eye making itself known. He certainly doesn't spot either of the women when he glances back over his shoulder, peering through the drizzle and fog. Still, when he turns forward again, he can feel the oppressive weight of uninvited attention, making him instinctively stoop with shoulders hunched, shrinking into a smaller target.

"No need for that, then," he murmurs aloud, very pointedly ignoring the few other pedestrians that passed him by on the wet pavement, "I am _well_ aware."

A woman passing by gives him a look and a wide berth. Jon just _hrm_ s to himself, understanding. Crazy disheveled men walking in the rain talking to themselves? Not too long ago, he'd give a wide berth, too.

Still probably would now, he admits to himself as he approaches the bistro, if for different reasons. The homeless didn't scare him now, but after Prentiss, and _Sasha_ , and everything else, well. It gives a whole new dimension to the term _stranger danger_.

He reaches the bistro just as the door is opening and freezes in his tracks. The man coming out _reeks_ , and he stutters to a halt in the doorway, and they stand there staring tensely at each other for a long, hungry minute.

"Darling," the woman just behind him urges, looking past him only to see Jon, glance back at ( _her husband, married for sixteen years_ ) the man, then at Jon again with suspicion. "Sorry- do we _know_ you?"

Jon can't spare a glance for her. He's too focused on the lingering anxious dread that leaks from the man, and how the man seems to feel something from Jon, too, because his hand is shaking on the door's push bar.

The attention presses down again on Jon's shoulders, renewed. He opens his mouth but says nothing, just stares ravenously at the man in the doorway and the stench of his untold story. He takes a sharp breath in, and realizes a moment later he's scenting the air.

Ozone. Faint whiffs of it, under the fear. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, too terrified to keep them open. No, he _promised_.

( _He promised he'd try._ )

He can't keep them shut. He looks, and he sees, and he Knows.

( _He's a pilot,_ HE CAN SEE IT, _he stopped flying two years ago, he never said why, he's an instructor now but only teaches with the simulator, he doesn't go up anymore-)_

And his mouth is open, and the words are burbling up, and he can feel the force behind them, and-

" _Excuse_ us," the woman snaps, seizing her husband by the elbow and hauling him quickly down the street, stealing glances back to be sure Jon wasn't following.

He couldn't if he wanted to. His legs nearly fold under him as the man leaves with his statement. A three course meal, trotted in front of a starving man before being whisked away. He could _cry_ \- and it startles him, because he really could. _He could cry_. The gnawing hunger in him groans for the knowledge it was denied. Desperate sorrow wells in his empty stomach.

He looks into the bistro as its glass door swings slowly, gently shut. The lights are bright and warm inside, and there are a dozen or so customers clustered at tables together, laughing over their lunches. None of them have stories. It makes them seem flat, somehow, like they have no substance. Like they aren't really people, just elaborate cardboard cutouts.

He sniffs at the air again, as if he could sense the Stranger's hand at work that way, and then feels immediately foolish. Down the street, the woman and her husband climb onto a bus. Jon sighs, and looks back to the bistro.

It's just, he doesn't have much of an appetite.

He takes the long way back to the Institute, very carefully not following the bus carrying the pilot.

Every step of the way, he feels watched.

* * *

Each day, he spends more time reading statements.

Each day, he feels a little more drained than the day before.

He wonders how long until he can't stop reading.

He wonders how long until there's nothing left.

He wonders what will happen when that day comes.

He does not Know.

* * *

Daisy's there sometimes. Sometimes, she's not. When she is, she's usually a silent presence in the room as Jon prowls between shelves, grumbling to himself as he files statements he's consumed and pulls ones he hasn't.

Sometimes he feels her watching him, but she's been a copper for so long- she's been a _hunter_ for so long- it's hard to tell what's going on behind that impassive face.

He doesn't ask. He's being very careful, these days, about _questions_. Every time he starts one, he feels an instinctive push of energy behind it, and bites it off with a frustrated grimace. He really is trying, he _is_ , it's just. It's just, very _difficult_ when the statements do so little, and he's very. _Very_. Hungry.

Daisy, he knows, has a lot of stories. They're just sitting there, gathering dust behind that flat stare. She's even part of the Institute now, she's with the _Eye_ , and that would protect her from the nightmares.

He doesn't realize he's been staring until she clears her throat, making him startle. He nearly drops the statements he's holding. Has been holding, for minutes now, he realizes with a surreptitious glance to his watch.

"Are you... all right," Daisy half asks, watching him. Her voice is as even and controlled as her expression and it makes Jon uneasy.

Of course he's not all right, he's been staring at her like she's his meal ticket, and these old, _withered_ statements aren't cutting it and he's starting to really _feel_ it, and there's nothing he can do except numbly keep tally of the many ways his body was failing as he tried to get by on the metaphysical equivalent of sawdust bread. Skin that's going dry and thin and yellow. A body wasting ever thinner and more angular. Dark circles like inkblots under his eyes.

Maybe it's good that Martin is off doing his Lonely business, if he can't help but salivate at the sight of his coworkers these days. It puts him in mind of the Haan statements. _Meat is meat._

"I- yes. I'm fine, Daisy." He shoves the handful of statements into the nearest filing cabinet and tries to slip deeper into the stacks.

It doesn't work. She follows him, maintaining a distance but staying within eyesight of him. When he ducks around a shelf, she does too, from the opposite end. Somehow, she makes it look both casual and dangerous, like a house cat playing it cool and waiting until the exact right moment to snatch up the mouse.

"Really, Daisy."

"You been sleeping?" she asks. She leans against the shelf and he almost warns her against it, in case the shelf topples, but he realizes in a flash as though really seeing her for the first time that she's just a wisp of a person herself these days, and the admonishment dies in his mouth.

"I've been rather busy," he says instead, half turning his back to her to pull more statements at random from their files. If Gertrude had this _hunger_ about her, too, it was no wonder the Archive was such a mess when he took over.

"You've been reading statements," Daisy says, and it's not clear if she's asking or commenting, and he can't restrain the ire that slips out.

"Yes, well," he mutters, "a man's got to eat."

She hums at him, inscrutable, but she leaves him alone after that.

He takes his statements to his desk and he reads. At some point, Daisy leaves, but the whole time, the recorder listens.

* * *

He thinks the others still go home, sometimes. Melanie is definitely out more than she's in, and Martin- well, who knows. Basira's constantly off on secret missions, so it's hard to say where she is at any point. Sometimes Daisy goes with Basira, if Melanie is in. But at five o' clock, there's a regular torrent of normal employees from accounting and records and every other department that _wasn't_ deeply and intrinsically linked to an evil eldritch being as they leave for the day.

Jon does not leave. Jon sits in his office with the door locked and the key shoved into a file folder on the other side of the room and wills himself not to slip out among them, testing the air for the stories they carry. They work in the Institute, they're _bound_ to have a few in the mix.

He watches them from the window, or he doesn't watch them at all- just sits at his desk with his dry, yellowing hands curled into fists and stares unblinking at the heap of statements and cassette tapes in front of him and tries not to Know anything through the wood and plaster and concrete that separate him from them.

A few days into this, Basira nearly kicks down his locked door to see what he's up to, and he has to explain in a stammer with his heart pounding in his throat that no, really- he's very intently doing _nothing at all_.

* * *

He doesn't go home. He's not really sure he has a home to go to, anymore- he hadn't tried to go back to flat after he woke up from the coma. He didn't, and still doesn't, see the point, when he was already spending all his time before the Unknowing at the Institute anyway. It's not as though he has anything he cares about there, and a good selection of his clothes had already migrated to the Archive's document storage room well before the coma. He still has his apartment key, though. He keeps it in the top desk drawer next to an opened carton of cigarettes and his extracted rib, and at night, sometimes he opens the drawer to look at it and remind himself that he does exist outside of these marble walls. Did. Might.

* * *

Daisy comes and goes. _Time_ , as so many have told him already, is _hard_ ; he finds he's losing track more and more often. In the windowless stacks of the Archive, the statements blur together. Even most of the true ones are useless for the cause, and none of them have any real, hm. _Nutritional_ value. But he reads them, and _refuses_ to Know that you can glut yourself on rabbit meat and you'll still starve to death. This thought comes to him one of the times Daisy is present; he looks up at her startled when he thinks it, and she looks blankly back, and he doesn't know if the knowledge originated with her, with him, or with the Archive.

"You slept?" She asks. She doesn't ask if he's okay anymore; maybe she's tired of hearing his feeble lies, or maybe she doesn't like putting him in that position time and time again.

He shrugs. The number of statements he gets through are really the only way he can guess at the passage of time now, but his stacks of _read_ and _unread_ and _why bother_ are hardly stacks anymore; they've long since drifted together into a big mess of _all worthless_.

"Take a break," Daisy suggests.

"No, I- I'm good."

"Take a break," Daisy suggests more firmly. She stares at him. He stares at a point just over her shoulder, too worried that if he actually looks at her he won't be able to stop himself from picking at the edges of a story, prizing it loose with his words.

"Yes," he acquiesces. "Okay."

* * *

She walks him down to the storage room they've been dorming in. Once, there was just one cot that he would crash on if work ran too late, but a couple more had been scrounged up from somewhere and wedged in wherever they would fit. Daisy never touches him, and she doesn't have to order him, but she follows him a few feet back. Even now, after everything, she walks so incredibly quietly.

When she sits him on Basira's cot, he nearly protests, but only a soft sound escapes him before he gives up and gives in. Basira, he knows, wouldn't like him in her bed.

Maybe crawling under it would be more appropriate? Him being a monster and all. Ha. Ha... A pained grimace tugs at his lips.

He doesn't lay down, he just sits there. Truly, he's not exactly tired. He's weary, sure, the way they're all weary. But sleep? Sleep has little to offer him. Doze off, and revisit his victims' nightmares? He gets as little rest as they do. When he does close his eyes in this world it's as though ten dozen unblinking sets of eyes open in another, and now he's watching a shadow loom over terrified figure in bed, he's watching a man's flesh melt, he's watching dark threads of fate strangling the unwitting, he's watching an abattoir conveyor belt roll out into blinding light and endless shadow, he's watching, he's watching, he's watching.

Maybe if it actually served to nourish him. Alas. No such luck.

So, he sits on the edge of the cot, and alternately stares at his hands in his lap or at the cracks in the countless layers of paint that had been slathered over the brick of the wall in the any decades of the building's lifetime. They branch inward, ever smaller, and he follows the arms of them until he realizes he's seeing much more detail than he should be humanly able to, and he squeezes his eyes shut.

Daisy does him the courtesy of stepping out of the room for a while. When she eventually returns, he's exactly where she left him.

She says nothing. Her face is blank. She doesn't follow him when he goes back to his desk and shuffles through statements once more.

* * *

At night, it's hard for Daisy to keep her watch on him. She's still human, more or less. She still needs to sleep, even if Jon doesn't.

He's not alone.

He carefully eases himself down through the trapdoor into the tunnels. It's not really that he thinks he _has_ to; he's pretty sure that if he called from his office, the door would appear there. That's just disconcerting enough, however, that he has no desire to try it.

Instead, he seeks Helen out at its- _her-_ known haunt.

The door is there waiting for him, set into a perfectly uniform brick wall that it matches perfectly, and doesn't match at all. When he knocks, she opens moments later, as though she's been expecting him.

And of course she has, because there's a secret in her smile when she steps out of her maze into the Institute's, and there's enough substance in whatever she's not saying that Jon immediately leans in, eyes wide.

" _Tell me_ ," he breathes before he can stop himself, and he's rewarded by a corkscrewing stab of pain in his temple as Helen resists. Her smile curls in on itself, the unknowably minuscule point of it ever receding. He blinks and looks away before he's drawn too deep into that spiraling maw to get out.

"None of that," she scolds him lightly. When she wags a finger in the air, he's overtaken with a sudden surge of nausea. He's certain that her fingertip slices atoms, and still shrinks past them into something inconceivably _deeper_. They are impossibly long, those short, pudgy fingers of hers, and there are too many, and they twist in ways their joints shouldn't support. They are perfectly normal fingers on perfectly normal hands.

"You wouldn't have this problem if you took better care of yourself," she continues." When _is_ the last time you ate?"

He hesitates, because at some point he helped himself to some stale biscuits Martin had left in the break room months ago, just to try and stave off the hunger, and sometimes he makes a show of picking at whatever takeout Basira sometimes dump onto his desk even though it doesn't taste like anything. Still, he isn't sure when the last time he- but Helen is cocking her head, though it feels as though she stands still and the world cocks around her and _keeps_ on cocking at ever smaller and faster 30° angles, and he knows that isn't what she means.

"Really, Archivist," she admonishes gently. When she reaches out and cups his cheek in her hand, the entire side of his head is enveloped in the bony lumps and needling fingers. The points of her scratch at his skin, and there is a noise like a dry pen nib on toothy paper. He doesn't flinch away from what little pain there is ( _points sharper than any scalpel on earth, nerves severed so cleanly they don't even realize they're dead_ ) but he does lift his hand to the cuts. They've already healed over, but his fingertips come away dark and wet. "You won't get anywhere, living like this."

"I'm not so certain I'm alive," Jon says absently, still focused on the blood on his fingertips and ignoring how Helen's extremities still continue to wrap around him, though she stands at arm's length. The darkness has seeped into his dry, cracked skin, spider-webbing out along his fingerprints and staining him. "If I can't die, can I live? _Christ_ , I'm hungry."

His quavering introspection doesn't seem to interest Helen. She hums softly, dismissively, and retracts the endless expanse of her stubby arm, leaving him bloody and whole.

"If you need a way out," she offers, and his eyes are drawn to the door behind her. It's made for him. He Knows this. It's not really a comforting thought. Giving him a door out of the Archive doesn't mean he'd get another door out of her hallways. He's still not sure what her game is. If she even has a game.

"I don't-" he starts and stops. He forces his eyes away from the door to focus on Helen, then struggles not to focus too hard. For as friendly as the Distortion seems to be these days, it still exists at odds with the Eye. Can't make sense of something whose entire nature is twisting untruths. "I came to ask you- I-"

"You'll get no more stories from me, Archivist. You already have Helen's statement."

"You have more, though," Jon hisses, and he can't stop himself from reaching out and grabbing at her. Her shoulder is impossibly limp and thin under his hand, giving where it shouldn't. He lets go almost immediately. "You have more to give, I can _smell_ it, and it _won't hurt you,_ " he continues in the same breath, chest heaving. " _Tell_ -"

"Try it again," Helen warns, pressing her horrible hand to his mouth, "and you will regret it."

He doesn't attempt to pry her off of him. He's pretty sure if he tries, he'll just cut himself on her edges. Instead, he stands very still and holds his breath, letting her make the next move.

He continues to hold his breath.

It occurs to him he shouldn't be able to hold his breath this long.

He exhales heavily like he's been punched, and Helen finally pulls the endless twisting expanses of her compact body away.

Her smile is still coy and a little bit sad as she steps backward through her door again.

"My door's always open."

With that, she closes it behind her.

* * *

The blood isn't coming out.

There's a truly disgusting old locker room in the sublevel of the building, built in a time where it was perfectly okay to only provide one for men. It's ostensibly open for any employee who wants it, but apart from a few bicycle commuters rushing a shower after a particularly muggy summer commute, he's never spotted anyone else down there.

He's alone under the flickering fluorescents, leaning close to the mirror over the sink and scrubbing at one of the dark splotches on his cheek Helen had left him with. He thinks at first that they're bruises, but rethinks it when he realizes his fingertips where he'd touched the blood are the same dusky maroon.

He wets a paper towel and scrubs hard at one of the larger blotches on his cheekbone. The paper tears and pills under the pressure; blackish red curls of it fall to the grungy laminate counter.

Fleeting relief sparks in his chest, then quickly snuffs out as he looks up to the mirror again and realizes it wasn't the paper peeling away, but his skin.

He freezes, biting his lip. He turns his head and squints at the spot- the stain is dark on already dark skin, like a port wine birthmark, but when his face is mere inches from the glass, he can see the torn edge where stained skin had been shredded off to reveal the unstained skin beneath.

He picks at the torn edge with a ragged fingernail, peeling away the rest of the stain. It doesn't hurt.

After he buffs the edges smooth under the rough pads of his fingers, it's impossible to know that anything was ever wrong.

* * *

There are _creatures_ in his Archive.

Basira walks in on him tearing through stacks and stacks and stacks of manila file folders, shifting paper without reading and flicking a growing number of tiny brown specks into an empty mug on his cluttered desk.

" _Pseudoscorpions,_ " he hisses without prompting, picking yet another from between two false statements.

"...What?"

"Pseudoscorpions!" Jon repeats, and he waves the mug at her. When she comes close enough to look inside, he sees her face immediately twist in disgust. A mass of tiny arachnids with pinching claws are clambering over each other at the bottom of the mug, trying and failing to climb the sheer walls.

When he noticed the first few, he didn't think anything of it. Anywhere there's enough old, moldering paper, there's going to be pseudoscorpions on patrol, feasting on the mites and silverfish and whatever else they can find gnawing at the hoof glue and parchment. When he found a dozen in one day- a day he'd intended to use as a _break_ , just cleaning and filing and trying to think about literally anything except the all-consuming terror that lurked just outside his door- he'd begun to worry.

Maybe, he thought, this was something to do with Prentiss. But pseudoscorpions were a far cry from worms and maggots. The feel just wasn't the _same_. They aren't destructive, they aren't swarming anyone, they're just doing what pseudoscorpions do. The only strange thing, really, is that there are so many of them all at once.

And of course, his mind then went to the Spider, because hey- they're small, they scuttle, they catch and eat unsuspecting prey. Still, the feel isn't right.

The feel is _too_ right, in some ways. The pseudoscorpions, for all their creepiness, don't bother him in the least. He just isn't sure what to make of them.

Had they always been there? How long had they been quietly multiplying? Maybe it was something to do with the Archive?

When Basira reaches for the mug, still grimacing, he instinctively yanks his hand back. No- no, he doesn't want her too close to them. If they're something to do with the Archive, they might not be so kind to somebody who isn't as involved as he is.

He can't do that to Basira. He puts the mug back on his desk, far out of her reach, and continues flipping through old files and marveling at the fauna.

He hardly notices Basira leaving.

He doesn't notice at all when, engrossed in his thoughts, he absently takes a sip from his mug.

* * *

He's hungry, he's hungry, he's hungry, and he's in a _mood_ , and the sun shines dimly through the London gloom and his own filthy window but the women are avoiding him and he's _hungry_.

As he wrenches open filing cabinets and leafs roughly through rows and rows of folders stacked on beige metal shelves, he sulks and he fumes and he shakes his fist at the Eye because he's hungry and nothing _sounds_ good, all the flavors are _wrong_. This eighteenth century recollection of a mine collapse smells too _dusty_ and that statement about Spanish flu in the wake of the Great War seems _spoiled_ and the smooth, waxy scar that twists up his right hand burns in sympathy with his frustration.

Still. He pulls statements, he throws them on his desk. When he drops into his desk chair to sort through them, he's still deep in his own disgust. He hates that this is his life now, but even more distressingly, he hates that this is his selection. Stale and rotten and moldy memories of woes long since past, but. He's _hungry_.

He rushes through a short one about a butcher's wagon in East London, mostly because the faint sense of meatiness he gets from it at least recalls memories of days before the Archive when a steak was food and not wall decor, but it just makes him more irritable and restless, and he just wants to _eat_ , so he _does,_ and he pushes the statement into his mouth and he chews at it grudgingly before swallowing it down.

He picks up the next statement on his stack. He clamps it in his teeth and tears a chunk from it, then shoves the rest in his mouth, and while he's gnawing and drooling on the dry, crumbling paper and tang of old ink and he knows it's of the Vast, and a tourist to the Americas, and a close call at the Grand Canyon, and he is nourished.

When he notices the tape recorder still running, he pulls the tape and eats that too.

* * *

It _is_ something to do with Prentiss, he eventually decides. He can't think of another explanation. It's late; his is the only light on. The hallways are dark except for the eerie red glow over the emergency exits on either end.

There are more pseudoscorpions than ever. He's stopped trying to catch them. They ignore him just as happily as he ignores them, and when a few of them scuttle from the statement he's reading for a midnight snack to creep over his fingers with tiny pincers curled to their bodies he can feel an epiphany lurking just beyond his comprehension. He doesn't think they _belong_ to the Corruption, but he feels in his gut they are somehow _of_ the Corruption.

This statement involves Smirke and his architecture students. It was given by a contract laborer who worked far, far under him, turning figures of graphite and ink into monsters of steel and stone. The contractor speaks about meetings that Smirke likely intended to be secret, private- but the prestigiously wealthy have never been good at noticing the small people, and Smirke seemed to be no different. The laborer was hard at work framing rooms and laying stone through the night, trying to keep up with Smirke's rushed schedule, when his lofty employer gathered mysterious comrades and confidantes in one of the more finished rooms next door and spoke to them of rituals.

As Jon speaks the memory, he thinks he recognizes the character of Jonah Magnus himself in one of the shady figures. With some unease, he then hesitantly picks out Maxwell Reiner by the worker's description of a blind man, and assumes the presence of a Lukas at the mention of a flat and hollow fog. George Gilbert Scott is mentioned by name; the laborer knows him all too well from his picky insistence at tweaks to the plans that rubbed every working man on the site the wrong way. Angles that leave the hair on their necks prickling. Ceilings a little too low. Doorways on a nearly unperceivable slant.

It was, Jon decides with grim confidence, a meeting of the minds, and the topic of the evening was _balance_.

The laborer didn't remember all the details, and he didn't have the context to know what was important and what wasn't. Still, Magnus or whatever poor lackey who worked under him in his Archive had done well to excavate detail from his crowded memory. There was talk of dividing the entities. Dark, and Lonely, and Knowing, and so many others less richly represented in Smirke's social circles. There was talk, mostly between Smirke and Magnus, of understanding them. And then, there was vague and wandering talk of bringing them all back together again.

Balance, Smirke called it. Synthesis, was the word pulled from the laborer and put on paper, and the distinction feels important.

Jon considers it long after he's done reading, chewing at a hangnail as he considers and reconsiders.

Balance implies conflict, and artificially weighing alien entities against each other.

Synthesis implies an organic merging of entities.

Balance implies control.

Synthesis implies something much more unsettling. It is the harmony rather than the carefully coordinated discord. It is the sum of experience, rather than the antithesis.

As he brushes the pseudoscorpions off his closed laptop, he thinks of Jurgen Leitner and his metaphor of beleaguered ants panicking over disembodied eyes and fingers and feet that all belong to the same unknowably monstrous being.

He thinks of the rituals, and how they failed. He thinks of balance. He thinks of synthesis. The epiphany eludes him, just beyond reach.

He tears at the hangnail and it rips away from his finger, tearing up past his nail bed and towards his knuckle. It doesn't sting the way it should; when blood wells up in its path, it's nearly black and tastes strange when he licks it away. He abandons his ponderings to pick at the new little injury, surprised it isn't healing the way all the other nicks and bruises do. More skin is torn away as he pulls at the edges with a bitten thumbnail. The skin gives with a dry tearing sound, and when he peels it back in morbid fascination there is another perfectly healthy layer of skin underneath. The blood oozes from between layers, staining every centimeter of skin it touches.

When it drops from his pristine finger to the laborer's statement, it's indistinguishable from the hasty blots of black ink already there.

* * *

When Daisy visits again, something is different. There is a different atmosphere to her stoicism; what usually feels quietly convivial now bears an edge of tension. The stench of terror that follows her is as irresistible as always, and he is careful to keep his distance.

She goes to her corner as usual while Jon rearranges statements on the shelves, and he feels her watching. He's in the middle of restructuring his system of organization; he shifts them intuitively until they find comfortable homes with new neighbors. The Vast rests beside the Eye rests beside the Spider rests beside the Stranger, on and on. He's drawing parallels. He's making the statements _sing_.

Harmony. Synthesis. He can feel the epiphany looming and maturing.

"Basira mentioned scorpions."

"Pseudoscorpions," he corrects her, vanishing between shelves. "It's not the Corruption. I think it's the Eye."

"Think, or know?"

"Think." He regards a few of the arachnids clinging to his arm. "It's what the Eye does, isn't it? Cannibalizing all the other entities, farming them for new fear. Why not recycle some of the classics? Maybe the pseudoscorpions were the Archive's way to adapt to Prentiss's worms. Like, like an immune system."

He's thinking aloud more than he's trying to explain things to Daisy. This feels... pertinent. It also makes his head throb with a tension headache that even the Ceaseless Watcher's healing factor can't stave off.

"Basira is worried."

"I reall think everything is fine, I don't think the pseudo-"

"She's worried about _you_."

Ah.

He sets down his armful of files on an empty shelf and thinks for a moment. He looks back at her. Daisy is standing; she's moved out of her corner to stand in the center of the end of the room with the desks, as though preparing for a fight. She looks smaller than ever in all that open space. He knows he hardly looks any better- he is dry and withered and sunken like a natural mummy, reduced to a husk by relentless winds.

"Look at us. You're wasting away as much as I am. I'm tired," Jon confides quietly. "Aren't you tired?"

It's a thoughtless question, and slips out like a living thing with a mind of its own. Daisy is frowning as she gives out a jerky, halting response.

"Yes. No. I'm- restless. Want to. Chase. Hunt."

Her blank expression has darkened slightly, and he nearly regrets forcing an answer from her, but he's also struck by a novel idea.

"What do you say, Daisy," he entreats from his place in the stacks, low and earnest. "You and me head down in the tunnels, hunter and hunted, and just _have at_. Nobody else gets hurt. You get to _chase_ ," he says, flashing his teeth in an unpleasant smile. "You catch me, you kill me like every other monster you've put down."

" _You_ catch _me_..." Daisy prompts, still standing several yards away. He can see her hands twitching for a weapon, and it fills him with anticipation rather than fear.

"I catch you, I rip the fear out of you like Jared ripped the bones out of me, until you're completely empty." He knows his eyes are glassy and fixed as he says this and stares at her, but he can't help it, because he Knows the Hunt is still in her and if he just finds the right fingerhold he can pull it back to the surface, and he's _desperate_.

"Who's the hunter."

"Both of us, I suppose." He retreats further back into the scattered shadows of his Archive. "Hunter, hunted. There's not too much difference. Plenty of running and bloodshed for everyone involved."

"No," she says, and it's not argument, but agreement. He can feel her eyes even when he looks away, his fingers whispering as they brush over paper and parchment and tanned human skin. He still can't quite read her, but he's retained enough self control not to force truths out her. Well, mostly. He makes mistakes.

"What do you say," he repeats, when she stays quiet a little too long.

"...I'll pass."

"Hm." He picks a morsel from his shelves and pops it into his mouth as he slips surreptitiously between shelves. It fills his mind with a burst of the Lonely. Angie Wu, sitting alone in a movie theater in 2007, finds that when the house lights come back up that nobody notices her. It's bland and gray and it takes the edge off. When he swallows, he concedes. "Fair enough."

* * *

Melanie, of all people, has noticed statements going missing.

She's not really working anymore, and she's still beyond livid with him for digging the ghost bullet out of her leg, but she's doing a favor for Basira by pulling together all the statements she'd pulled to research the Slaughter and she notices that some that should have been there... aren't.

It's a short list of people who might take it. Jon is her first stop, and she comes in hot, already scowling suspiciously at his shape in the shelves that filled a large portion of the Archive.

"Jon," she calls, just shy of open aggression. "Have you seen-"

"-the statement of field nurse Frances Schumaker, recorded 1933, on a series of unusual skirmishes outside of Mulhouse, Germany in 1917," his voice floats up from the dust and gloom. At her silence, he adds, "I'm sorry, Melanie, it just-"

"Yes," she snaps. "It just _happens_. Even though you're supposed to be trying to not _let_ it _just happen_."

"Sorry," he says again. Neither of them can see the other, which is just as well, because he's hardly decent. He's wearing yesterday's clothes and sitting halfway up a pallet rack that houses thousands of yesteryear's statements neatly stacked in yellow-brown cardboard cartons. One of them is open and sitting next to him, and every now and then he fishes a real one out to nibble at. There's a lit cigarette in his mouth; his sleeves are rolled up and the skin on his arms is cracked and peeling in sheets. His whole body is that way, sloughing like a lizard, but his arms are easy targets. It doesn't hurt, but it does itch, and when he scratches, more skin tears away. It's indistinguishable from the blank "crusts" of the statements he lets flutter to the floor. Now and then he digs too deep with his sharp, sharp nails and the black blood wells up and spreads like ink on paper, filling the cracks. Like spiderwebs. Like fractals.

"So where is it."

Mm. The statement.

"...I haven't seen it."

He'd had that one a few days back. It had been stale like all the others, but there had been so much fear there- he saw it in grayscale when he closed his eyes and let his mind drift. Soldiers gone feral, both sides fighting each other and their own and anyone else that wandered too close.

"What," Melanie growls with renewed rage, "you don't _KNOW?_ "

"No," Jon says from his perch, taking a drag from his cigarette. "I don't."

* * *

That night, he locks the door to his office and settles down under the light of his desk lamp with a box cutter and fastidiously peels off the stained skin on his arms, careful not to cut too deep and draw more blood.

He freezes when he sheds a layer and thinks he recognizes patterns in how the blood settled. After a minute of hesitation, he carefully cuts another layer deeper and removes a rectangle of blotted skin to reveal a patch of crisp handwriting below, as dark and clear as if it's tattooed there.

Curious and more than a little horrified, he widens the patch, prying at the edges with the flat blade. It doesn't get tender as he digs deeper; whatever he has become, his body seems to replace what it loses in an instant. A little skin, if he can still call it skin, doesn't hold a candle to a _finger_ , and he couldn't even manage that back when he was more human. And honestly, he's not sure it _can_ be called skin. Especially not with a statement he consumed days ago staring up at him from the excavation site in the belly of his forearm.

Jon extends the blade of his box cutter another click and goes at it with a little more urgency, tearing the frayed paper-skin back and exposing more statements, diagrams from Smirke's old letters to Magnus, snatches from journals and books and _Mr. Spider wants more-_

He slashes at the illustration with sudden panic and the blood spills out, creeping across his arm to draw more memories of fear and suffering on his skin in a hundred different hands. It pools on his desk and sinks into the wood grain, and stains his shirt. The cut on his arm is already healed, but when he mops up the blood with his other sleeve he's relieved to find that it's completely covered up the page of the Leitner that had previously insinuated itself there with an amorphous blob of solid black.

He's almost relieved to discover he still has a heart, pounding furiously beneath his too few ribs as he breathes through his panic and lets it subside.

He smooths the edges of his torn skin, and giggles manically.

You are what you eat.

* * *

It's Martin who notices the tapes, or lack thereof.

He doesn't come down from Lukas' offices to talk to him about it, but at some point, Jon returns to his desk to find a pale yellow post-it note stuck to his laptop.

_Jon,_

_What's happening to the statement recordings? We've stopped getting them upstairs._

_I know the tape recorders are still around. There's one recording right now. I guess it's curious too._

_Please just leave the tapes with the receptionist and I'll pick them up?_

There's a recorder on Jon's desk, too, now, and after he reads the note aloud for it he hits stop and ejects the cassette. He doesn't quite feel guilty about hooking a finger under the thin brown band of tape and pulling, pulling, pulling it unspooled.

Martin Blackwood, sitting alone in an office in 2018, worries that the man he loves isn't quite a man anymore.

It makes a nice snack, if nothing else. It's fresher than anything else he might dig up.

A second post-it, clearly written much more hastily, is stuck over the dark spot on his desk where he couldn't quite clean up the blood.

_Are you okay?_

* * *

The others have been talking. He's not sure the exact chain the gossip traveled in, but it's reached Helen, because she's opened a door into his office when the building was dark and empty and let a terrified victim run screaming straight into his lair.

Maybe she pities him. Or maybe she empathizes. Either way, she's spoon feeding him and he knows it because her sloppy seconds fill the room with sweet, delicious, farm-fresh terror and he snaps to attention from his perch in the stacks even before the man starts screaming and pounding at his locked office door.

He moves more quietly than he knew he was capable of when he slides down from the pallet rack and begins stalking towards the man. He's middle aged, white, and the sort of chubby that dads always seem to go if they don't get stringy and tough like beef jerky instead. Jon Knows he's a glasses wearer, but he's lost his. A very small cut under his eyebrow suggests he took a fall and the frames broke against his face- that, or he just didn't have the chance to pick them up again before continuing to flee whatever was after him.

(Helen, of course, but _he_ wouldn't know that.)

The poor fool's all but throwing himself against the office door, wailing and sobbing and looking back every second to watch the mustard yellow door that still stands open.

He eventually glimpses Jon, and instantly redirects his frantic terror towards him. He abandons the locked door to stumble to the Archivist instead, cowering so badly that even small, diminutive Jon towers over him. Violently shaking hands grasp at his shirt. They're damp and clammy and if he weren't so hungry he would want to bat them away.

"Please," the man sobs, and he's still paying too much attention to the nonsensical door to notice how eagerly Jon is lapping up his panic, and how attentively he is listening. "Please, I- I went through the- I- _please, you have to help, there's something in_ -"

" _Tell me everything,_ " he growls, and the man reels and breaks under the sudden pressure of the compulsion. He blurts his story with bulging eyes, and Jon looms a little closer, _watching_ , and he's _watching,_ and _watching,_ and he feels a thousand unseen eyes open and all focus simultaneously on this pathetic sample of human life. Jon can feel the statement forming under his skin in live time until the man's words dry up and he's a shuddering mess on the floor.

Then, it becomes real.

For the first time in a long time, Jon feels satisfied, and it horrifies him. He's still staring in revulsion at what he's reduced his victim to when Helen finally pokes her head through the yellow door.

"No need to thank me," she says softly, a smile on her face. She takes in Jon's haggard, changed appearance with detached interest. "Word's going around that you're acting strangely. I thought maybe you were hungry." She bends to seize one of the man's ankles in her enormous, viciously sharp, soft little hand and drags him through the door to her hallways as if it's nothing. She rejoins Jon in the Archive and kicks the yellow door shut behind her. As the latch catches with a very final click, her smile widens; she may have briefly shared her quarry, but she is still the cat that got the canary.

"I broke him," Jon whispers, staring at the yellow door and Helen in turn. She ignores his distress, instead wandering to his desk and glancing over the statements scattered across it. "I- I _beheld_ him. I-"

"Oh, give me some credit," Helen croons. "I had to do my part before he was any use to you."

"I didn't ask for this." He scratches nervously at his neck and knows that new words spiral over the skin there, rambling about doorways and halls and things with bones in their hands and the mounting dread as a strange man listens and does nothing. "I didn't, I didn't ask for this."

"But you needed it. You know," she says, running an inquisitive finger over the dark stain on his desk and raising dark splinters, "this could be a more permanent arrangement. You need their fear, and I can provide an endless supply."

"And what do you get out of it?" Jon asks faintly, still distracted by what he's done and utterly mistrustful. There's no sign the man was ever in the room, but he can still smell the residue of him, can still feel the shape of him on the floor, seizing and weeping.

Helen blinks at him, actually taken off guard.

"A _friend_ , Archivist."

He turns to Helen, and perhaps for the first time, he _really_ sees her.

"I can see every turn in your hallways and pin them to a map until I Know you so well, you _stop_ ," he says, because he Knows it to be true. "I can make sense of you. I can shatter your fractals and rearrange them into straight lines. Undoing you would be so _easy_."

It isn't a threat. When he says it, it's with calm and hollow certainty. These are things he Knows. He sees the possibilities in her. He sees where she has to break, to be slotted into an ordered world. A _Known_ world. He thinks that Gertrude had approached this knowledge when she sent Michael to his fate in the cold north. Then, a moment later, he Knows it. She wasn't the Archivist that Jon is, but she leveraged her ability when she needed to.

He is staring at Helen. She is watching him back, prickling uneasily on all her fuzzy dichotomous edges.

"I think, perhaps," Helen says slowly, "we should spend some time apart."

"Yes," he agrees faintly. "Yes, I think that's wise."

As she retreats to her hallways, he simultaneously retreats to his stacks.

* * *

He has his epiphany.

You are what you eat. It really is that simple.

It's almost underwhelming.

* * *

They try to kill him the next day. It doesn't go well.

They break in early in the morning, as if they think they can get the jump on him, but Jon hasn't really slept in ages, he just closes his eyes and wanders. He hears them the moment Melanie slides a rake pick into the lock. He closes the eyes that watch dreams and opens the usual ones and briefly considers slipping away into the tunnels.

In the end, he decides it's just putting off the inevitable. When Basira, Daisy, and Melanie get the door open, he's waiting for them. He finds himself relieved that Martin isn't there with them, that he won't get hurt. All three women freeze when they see him, and he has enough time to take stock of their weapons- Basira has a handgun, but both Melanie and Daisy have opted for mean looking knives- before one of them mutters "fuck!" and Basira shoots him.

He... feels it. It smacks into his shirt (already bloodstained, he can't stop picking at his own pages) and then into _him_ with a sick, dry thud. The impact vibrates through him. Black, inky blood spreads for a moment over the wound before it stops. And that's it. He frowns down at his chest with surprised consternation, then frowns up at Basira.

"I'm bleeding," he remarks, mildly offended. He looks down again, and pulls at the hole in his shirt to feel the entrance wound in his paper chest and marvel how his skin ruffles outward from the site in tattered layers like a bundle of oily black feathers. When he picks at it with a fingernail, pseudoscorpions emerge from the hole in quantity, waving their tiny little pincers like knights trying to defend a fortress. "Ah," he says faintly.

He doesn't get to say anything else before Basira shoots him again, with just as little effect. Melanie snarls and moves to charge him, but _Daisy_ of all people shows restraint and holds her back with an outthrust arm.

"Do you mind?" he asks Basira, voice a little high and funny as he shakes the blood and arachnids from his fingers. The ink creeps up over his hand to draw sigils he thinks he recognizes from some old text recovered from a former member of the Lightless Flame.

"I don't know what you are, but you aren't Jon anymore," Basira barks, and it turns Jon's baffled frown into a scowl.

"I'm still me! I've always been-"

"You're a monster," Daisy says, and because it's coming from her mouth with such flat, factual delivery, it stings even more.

" _Drop the gun_ ," he compels Basira. He's running out of good humor.

"No," Basira fights him, but her arm shakes and gradually lowers.

"This is my house," Jon says, and with more force he repeats: " _Drop. The gun._ "

It clatters to the floor. When Melanie ducks Daisy's arm and comes roaring at him, he's prepared for that too.

" _Run_ ," he says, pouring as much power into the single word as he can, and her eyes are wide as she skids past him, circles around like a satellite slingshotting around the moon, and then she's screaming in rage as she sprints full tilt out the door.

Just Basira and Daisy, and Basira's struggling to bend and pick up her gun again.

" _Stop,_ " he commands, and she freezes, seething at him but unable to reach her firearm. Jon takes the opportunity to pull a chair from the nearest desk and sink into it. "I don't want to hurt you."

"Too late for that," Basira snarls.

"Daisy, you should have taken me up on my offer. The tunnels." Jon watches the pseudoscorpions cleaning up the edges of his gunshot wounds, picking at the frayed bits until the holes were completely closed up and smoothed over.

"We had no choice, Jon," Daisy says simply.

"Because I'm a monster." He broods for a moment. His frown only gets deeper. "I think," he says slowly, "it's time to close the Magnus Institute."

"What?"

"It's not like it serves a purpose anymore," Jon admits. "It's only here for the Archive, and- well, the Archive and the Archivist, they're. That is. I _am_ the Archive, aren't I? Just, a collection of experiences with the entities, recorded and, and, and, _exploited_ for fear. Well, the Archive tried to eat me, so I ate it instead, and now it's all just me. So this _building_ doesn't really matter anymore, does it?"

Neither woman says anything. Basira stares, horrified. Daisy is as unreadable as ever.

"So," Jon circles back, anxiety and heartache lumping up in his throat, "I think it's time for you to _leave the Magnus Institute, and leave me alone_."

Like robots, both Basira and Daisy straighten and tensely begin moving towards the door. Their movements are jerky. They're fighting it.

"This is my house," he reminds them softly without stirring from his seat. "I'm so sorry."

They leave the Institute. He can hear Basira yelling with every step she's forced to take. Daisy drags her feet with quiet resignation and gritted teeth. They leave him alone.

* * *

In enormous letters, Jon writes CLOSED on a sheet of printer paper with a black marker, and he pours as much energy into it as he can, hoping it works as intended. Before the first regular employees can trickle in, he walks it down to the huge front doors of the stately old building and tapes it at eye level above the door knob.

He closes the door and locks it, and goes back to the Archive to wait.

Al morning, he watches employees and visitors alike pause with their hand on the door handle to gaze with eyes unfocused at the sign, then walk away.

* * *

The next to find him is Lukas. One minute, Jon is alone, sniffing through the shelves for the last of the truths hidden there, and the next minute, he feels a soft, empty fuzz where there shouldn't be anything. When he turns to look at Lukas over his shoulder, the man actually looks surprised that he's been made.

"You really think the Lonely can protect you here? This is the Institute," Jon says, turning. He is covered in more text than the ghost of Mary Keay, crawling with pseudoscorpions, and painted with his own blood. "This is the _Eye_. _I see you._ "

* * *

Third- and he's been dreading this most- is Martin.

Martin is too deep in to be so easily turned away by a sign at the door, and for as much as absence was Lukas' calling card, Martin can tell the difference between absence and the _absence_ of absence. When Martin sees the CLOSED sign, he panics and makes a beeline for the Archive.

Martin frantically takes in the mess- pools of watery black blood dried into tar, shreds of not-paper covered in writing scattered in two small sprays on the floor, ransacked shelves, and the stench of cigarette smoke. The two post-its he'd left are carefully stuck to Jon's laptop, moved but not discarded.

Jon waits in the tunnels, unbreathing and unmoving, until he Knows Martin has left to take his search elsewhere.

He doesn't want to be seen like this, not by Martin. He's not sure what he'd say to him. He doesn't want to order him away.

When Martin is gone, he takes one last troubled look around the tunnels and climbs back up to his office.

He's still waiting for one more.

* * *

It's not long before Elias finally shows. He's in as good of health as ever, and if he seems a little sharper, a little meaner, then Jon is willing to believe he's just seeing him more clearly now, because he sees _everything_ more clearly now.

"What," Elias asks as he steps into the room, clothed in his regular sweater vest and slacks, "did you do to my Archive?!"

He's not even making an attempt at stealth, which Jon appreciates. He also doesn't seem to think much about how Jon currently looks like a half-busted piñata filled with arachnids. He takes more umbrage with the fact that Jon is smoking. When he sees the cigarette, he wrinkles his nose.

"Put that out!" he snaps, and Jon wordlessly acquiesces, dropping it into a mug that's already half filled with butts. "You've really made a mess of things, Jon, I must say."

"The Archive is more organized than ever," Jon counters softly. True, there are statements scattered across the floor, and the shelves are half empty where they aren't filled with the mixed, dumped contents of old boxes, but it's all _fake_. Every last truth he could find is a part of him, now.

"What did you do?" Elias asks suddenly, reading his tone and disliking it. There's static in Jon's mind as Elias squints and sways on his feet, and goes red with anger. "Do you realize how long it took me to collect those statements!?"

"Two hundred and seven years," Jon replies automatically, then pauses to parse. Understanding slots into place. The horrible picture comes into focus. The epiphany expands.

"And you just- _ate_ them!"

"That's what you put me here to do, Jonah, isn't it?" Jon's eyes are narrowed. Everything is slotting into place. He sees. He Knows. He _KNOWS._

"To read, yes, not to _literally_ consume- those statements are irreplaceable, Jonathan, you more than _anyone_ should-"

"They're still here." Jon tears off a strip of skin, nearly bored with the act, and reveals the statement of David Laylow. Tears off a strip of skin. Statement of Christof Rudenko. Tears off a strip of skin. They flutter to the floor and even Jonah looks taken aback by the sight. The Beholding is generally... well, _neater_. It's part of what drew Jonah to it, Jon Knows. Its tidiness. Not like the Flesh or the Corruption or the Buried. Seeing and Knowing is immaterial. It may leave your soul tarnished and warped, but your hands stay blessedly clean.

"Well, that's just great, Jon," Jonah breathes. "Jesus _Christ_."

Jon shoots him a dark look.

"This is what you wanted, isn't it? Jonathan Sims, Archive, the sum of his experiences! Well, it worked, congratulations. I've got bugs, courtesy of Prentiss, and, and _spiders_ manifesting in my goddamn skin, and pain doesn't hurt and every other delightful little souvenir one could hope for from a _evil god sightseeing tour_."

Jonah's face goes a little strange. He glances around the room.

"Have... have you seen Peter Lukas about?"

"I've Seen him," Jon says, and he thinks he sees Jonah smile for a split second before he can squash it down. Jon is tired of playing, though. "I'm not interested in what you're planning, and I won't help you. "

"I don't know what you mean," Jonah says after a moment. He smiles again, but it's plastic and empty.

" _Tell me about the Watcher's Crown."_

Jonah hisses and takes a step back in shock.

"That won't work on me, Jon, and I recommend you _stop_ , _now._ "

"You say that," Jon muses aloud, "but nobody really knows how the Entities work, do they? How their avatars are _structured_. You may have appointed me, Jonah," he says with some force, "but that doesn't mean you're stronger than me."

"I'll tell you about your parents' death," Jonah threatens, clearly nervous. He's slowly backing away as Jon finally rises from his chair. "If you don't stop. I'll tell you the truth about how much your grandmother h-"

"I already know," Jon interrupts, unaffected. He prowls toward Jonah with the grace of the Hunt, the savagery of the Slaughter. "I know everything. I always knew. You can't hurt me. _Tell me about the Watcher's Crown!"_

And Jonah breaks.

* * *

When the fire at the Archive is published in the news, it's listed as an accident. Faulty wiring, but a miracle the building was closed for maintenance, and there was only one casualty.

The sectioned police know better, and the fire department has no interest in disputing it.

When a thin, angry woman slips past the barrier to dig through the wreckage for a trapdoor, she finds nothing at all. Several streets away, a tall, soft man looking for a discrete door in an ancient wall discovers it isn't there anymore. When both of them independently call out for Helen, nothing happens.

And nothing continues to happen. An incantation is not read. The sky does not open. The world does not end.

The tunnels under the Magnus Institute are lost. _Moved_ , nobody says, but everybody thinks. Elias is dead, and the Institute is headless. Jon is missing, and that worries them all in different ways, but none of them ever discuss it. They never see each other. For the most part, they don't want to.

Life becomes normal, even if they stay odd. Basira takes work in security, and Daisy tries _not_ to work. Melanie moves in with Georgie. Martin considers moving north, away to somewhere cleaner and simpler where his memories won't hurt.

Sometimes, doors open where they should not. People often disappear. Sometimes they turn up again, too terrified and confused to speak. Usually, they do not.

Sometimes, bones are stolen. Sinkholes sometimes open. Sometimes, disease takes hold where it shouldn't.

Always, the Archive takes note.


End file.
